Robot Form and Motion Influences Social Attention

Abstract

For social robots to be successful, they need to be accepted by humans. Human-robot interaction (HRI) researchers are aware of the need to develop the right kinds of robots with appropriate, natural ways for them to interact with humans. However, much of human perception and cognition occurs outside of conscious awareness, and how robotic agents engage these processes is currently unknown. Here, we explored automatic, reflexive social attention, which operates outside of conscious control within a fraction of a second to discover whether and how these processes generalize to agents with varying humanlikeness in their form and motion. Using a social variant of a well-established spatial attention paradigm, we tested whether robotic or human appearance and/or motion influenced an agent's ability to capture or direct implicit social attention. In each trial, either images or videos of agents looking to one side of space (a head turn) were presented to human observers. We measured reaction time to a peripheral target as an index of attentional capture and direction. We found that all agents, regardless of humanlike form or motion, were able to direct spatial attention in the cued direction. However, differences in the form of the agent affected attentional capture, i.e., how quickly the observers could disengage attention from the agent and respond to the target. This effect further interacted with whether the spatial cue (head turn) was presented through static images or videos. Overall whereas reflexive social attention operated in the same manner for human and robot social agents for spatial attentional cueing, robotic appearance, as well as whether the agent was static or moving significantly influenced unconscious attentional capture processes. Overall the studies reveal how unconscious social attentional processes operate when the agent is a human vs. a robot, add novel manipulations to the literature such as the role of visual motion, and provide a link between attention studies in HRI, and decades of research on unconscious social attention in experimental psychology and vision science.